Douglas Osheroff

Osheroff, whose father was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants (his mother of Slovak Lutheran descent), was a graduate student at Cornell when he made his prize-winning discovery. While cooling helium-3 to within thousandths of a degree of absolute zero, he and his supervisors detected tiny anomalies revealing that the isotope becomes a superfluid — a frictionless quantum liquid. The 1972 discovery, honored with the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics, opened a rich field of low-temperature quantum physics.